Greenleaf: Oprah Defends New OWN Church Drama

by Jessica Pena, May 30, 2016

Is there drama off the screen for OWN’s new TV show? Oprah Winfrey recently defended her upcoming new series Greenleaf, The Wrap reports.

The family drama stars Merle Dandridge as Grace Greenleaf, the estranged daughter of a megachurch bishop (Keith David) who returns home after her sister dies under mysterious circumstances. Lynn Whitfield and Winfrey also star.

During a recent advance screening of Greenleaf, Winfrey said she hopes the series helps people see and examine themselves:

All my life I have been trying to use ‘the word,’ and words, as a way of saying to the audience … whatever the audience was, the [“O”] magazine, or “The Oprah Show,” and now OWN, to say: ‘Here is a way to look at yourself, and can you see you in this picture? Here is a way out, here is a way up, here is a way through. This is just another platform [TV drama] to able to do that, in a really collaborative way.”

According to The Wrap, the first episode of the drama highlights modern problems with the church, like “alleged sexual abuse, questionable preferential tax status for wealthy corporate churches, personal enrichment of religious personalities, and the hypocrisy of bible beaters’ infidelity.”

Winfrey also mentioned that the show’s lead patriarch, Bishop James Greenleaf (David), is not based on real-life megachurch bishop T.D. Jakes.

The only resemblance is that our main character is named ‘Bishop’ and your name is ‘Bishop.’ From my lips to your ears, ‘I, Oprah Winfrey, am not going to do anything that disrespects the church. I am sitting where I am today because of the black church.”

Leave a Reply

The show is extremely disrespectful to the Church. During the first episode, there was a sex scene inside the church during praise and worship. The show highlights Oprah’s underlining disdain for Christianity by having a scene like that during church services and also with the constant questioning of Christianity itself during the show. I lost a lot of respect for Oprah based on the show’s disrespect of my religion.